


Leviathan

by Gelgoogle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dark, Dialogue Heavy, Drama, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, So non-canon, Villain rant, Will be blown away by the cannon canon on release day, Written before the release of Civil War, crack theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 16:11:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6202048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gelgoogle/pseuds/Gelgoogle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America and the Winter Soldier have tracked the mysterious Baron Zemo to his mountain hideaway, hoping to get some answers and bring the superhero civil war to a close without any more madness. But there's more to Zemo than the Captain ever could have guessed, and it may cost him dearly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leviathan

Cap had learned to trust his gut.

It had saved him from everything from sniper fire to ambushes in elevators. His instinct that something about this otherwise unremarkable junior Senator from Louisiana who had come out so strongly in support of the Accords had lead him to this stately manor in the Bavarian Alps.

A vacation home, the Senator would have had you believe.

Steve had asked Scott and Clint to see what they could dig up on this particular elected official, Scott using his extralegal contacts and Clint calling in a few favors from some spooks he had befriended in the SHIELD days. The first sweep was fairly mundane.

The not-so-good Senator, born into old money, obtained a law degree from Harvard but made a name for himself as a man of the people through pro-bono work and community outreach, catapulting him into two mayoral terms and a leapfrog all the way up to the Senate. Well-spoken and well-liked but not exceptionally so. Typically voted along party lines but not so often that he could be accused of blind loyalty and not so rarely that you could call him a maverick. He was fantastically average.

Senator Bruhl didn't seem to stand for much of anything until he took to the floor in an impassioned speech calling for his fellow countrymen to support his legislation designed to expand and reinforce the Accords. At first blush, one would simply see a young politician turning into a firebrand over an issue he could wring dry for credibility as a man who cared for international stability and came down hard on crime.

Then Scott's contacts came back, having followed the money. The Senator had been elected with some very dirty money.

As much as it rankled Steve, corruption alone hadn't put him in Captain America's crosshairs. What had really done it was Clint's intel.

That dirty money had come from Hydra.

Of course. Of course it was them. What were the Sokovia Accords but Project Insight in a slightly newer package, a trading away of personal liberties in the name of national security? Bruhl and his co-conspirators had simply narrowed their focus, honing in on the superhero community, such that there was one, to make it more palatable to the general public. What did the average American care that the government wanted to come down on the costumed freaks who could level a city block?

Hydra's long arm had been enough to raise a few dozen red flags, but it was hardly the smoking gun he would need to go halfway around the world to pursue the Senator. It was hard enough staying one step ahead of Tony and Ross; he didn't need to risk an international trip. For all Steve knew, Bruhl didn't care where his money came from and wasn't actively working with a terrorist cell. Ignorance alone was not murder.

Then, on the final sweep, one of Clint's contacts had come forward with the final nail in the Senator's coffin.

The Senator wasn't a Bruhl at all. His family had bought that name after the war.

His ancestral name was Zemo.

 

 

 

Steve tried not to wince as another man dropped like a doll, his proverbial strings cut by another well-placed bullet. He tried to put out of his mind the image of Bucky quickly, professionally, mechanically acquiring his next target, just as Hydra had programmed him once upon a time.

Steve Rogers was an old soldier. The very best of them if the propaganda had anything to say about it. He had killed before, and he would very likely kill again. But he didn't like it and, quite frankly, went out of his way to avoid it. The world wasn't at war anymore, and so the rules of the game had changed. He took his enemies alive whenever possible.

Because people were fundamentally good. Yes, there were people like Hitler and Goebbels and Schmidt and Zola, but they had all failed in the end. Steve had to exorcise their specters a bit more often than he would like, but the people of America were, by and large, a good and decent people who knew right from wrong and would fight to uphold that distinction.

But in the face of men with guns trying to murder him and him oldest friend (his only friend, he mused in his darker moments), desperate times really did call for desperate measures. He couldn't afford to pull any punches or settle for half-measures as he and Bucky, the last of his rebel band, stormed a Hydra fortress crawling not with the usual Congressional security detail but private security hired from a PMC with a long and storied history of being in bed with Hydra.

In was with these terrorist ties in mind that Steve shoulder tackled a man with an Uzi, putting him out with a sharp blow to the temple before launching his shield at another man with a shotgun who came around the corner. The second man let out an erudite 'urk!' at the shield forcing every atom of oxygen out of his lungs before he bonelessly slid don to the impossibly expensive carpet.

Hydra had spared no expense.

 

 

 

“Herr Kapitan,” Bruhl/Zemo said with an exaggerated accent, sloppy salute, a glass of scotch in his free hand and a rather luxurious bathrobe wrapped around his person. “So good of you to join us.”

Steve blinked, perplexed. He knew there was a helicopter pad on the roof and had expected to catch Zemo just as he was being evacuated by his hired thugs. He had even ordered Bucky to wait outside and cover the roof in the event of an escape attempt. So why did the snake from Capitol Hill look like he was settling in for a nice, quiet night?

“There's not much of an 'us' left, _Zemo_ ,” he spat the word like a violent bodily emission. “Your security detail has been neutralized, and you're coming with us.”

“Neutralized?” Zemo gesticulated, sloshing a bit of his too-full tumbler across the carpet that would set most men back a month's salary. “Spare me the euphemisms, Kapitan. You killed them as surely as you killed _mein Vater_.”

Baron Heinrich Zemo, one of the faces of Hydra. Red Skul Johann Schmidt was Hydra's first and greatest head, but like the beast of legend, there were a great many more. Captain America had lead his Howling Commandos on several raids hoping to catch one or both of them, and leadership of the organization had passed to Zemo the elder when Schmidt had gone missing in a fantastical display of a power neither the Skull nor the Captain truly understood. It was Cap's understanding that Zemo had died in exile, living under an assumed name in South America in the seventies. Heinrich had already been old when the war was waged. It was a minor miracle he had lasted so long.

But even if he was blessed with longevity, the math didn't work.

"You're his son? You're too young—”

“Not at all, Kapitan,” Zemo the younger said with a wave of his finger. “I may not have your super soldier serum running through my veins, but there is a concoction that my father left to me, one that has afforded me luxuries. Such as a certain grace in the face of Father Time.” He paused, knocking back the entire drink. “But we are not here to discuss our metabolic gifts, now are we?”

“I am placing you under arrest.”

“No, Kapitan, you are here to learn a lesson,” said Zemo, who turned toward a wet bar by his roaring fireplace to fetch himself another drink. But just as his fingers hovered over the scotch, he jerked those fingers away from the stabbing shards of glass that flew every which way thanks to an expertly aimed shield. Zemo clicked his tongue. “How petulant, Kapitan. If you won't let me fill up on liquid couage, I'm afraid I may trip over my words, and it's very important that I impart to you the full significance of my lecture.”

Had he heard this from anyone else, he might have rolled his eyes or even fired back a one-liner the way he had learned to rattle them off after so much time spent with the Avengers. But there were no Avengers anymore. Not really. The name was still thrown around, but the fallout born of the Accords had been their death knell. People like Sam or Natasha or the Wakandan prince would survive their injuries, but there was no going back. The best he could do was forge ahead and see this man put behind bars.

“You're coming with me, Zemo,” said Steve, carefully but purposefully striding across the palatial living room with its bear skin rugs and paintings so old and so priceless the art student in Steve would have exploded with joy if he had seen them under any other circumstance. But even his love of that human expression had been sullied by association with this man.

Zemo, not flinching, not fleeing, not reaching for a weapon, sighed his most theatrical sigh.

“Leviathan.”

Cap froze. He may not have had the new kid's spider-sense, but he had his gut. And his gut was telling him to stand very, very still.

“What are you doing, Buck?”

The third man didn't make a sound.

“Leviathan,” Zemo repeated. “By Thomas Hobbes. You've read it, I hope?”

“Buck,” Steve said, watching his friend's reflection in the tray full of colored glass that now lay mostly broken by his shield. “We didn't come here to kill him. Not if we can help it. He can help us repeal the Accords but only if he testifies.”

“Leviathan,” Zemo said for the third time as if he didn't have a care in the world, as if he wasn't alone with two super soldiers, as if one wasn't pointing a gun straight at him, “is a work of heartbreaking beauty and ruthless genius. It is – been quite some time since I've read it, and I am quite drunk, so pardon any oversimplification. But our time is so short.”

“Buck, put the gun down.”

“We, as a people, are petty, violent brutes not far removed from Cro-Magnon. We are clannish things. We delineate into any number of tribes and war with each other for any number of reasons. So what is to be done about this? What is to be done if we rape and pillage the clan beyond our village at the slightest provocation?”

“I know you've been through a lot thanks to people like him. He may have even been in the room with you when it happened, but we can do more to hurt Hydra with him alive than dead.”

“Civilization, Kapitan. Civilization or at least some sense of greater power is necessary. Necessary to be the awful glue that binds these wretched creatures together. One might appeal to God, but we can just as easily appeal to government. We need that higher power to keep us in line, to protect us from ourselves and each other. And we very nearly had that with Project Insight.”

“Buck—”

“Kapitan,” Zemo murmured, pausing in his rambling speech.

“Buck, please. Try to think about how far we've come to get here. Not just to this place, but to this moment.”

  
“Kapitan, I really must insist that you pay attention to me.”  
  
Steve paid him no mind.

“It's terribly important that you listen to what I have to say.”

Steve knew it was a gamble, that there could be hidden guns or some ace hidden up Zemo's sleeve, but he had to risk it to get Buck back on track. He turned, dropping his shield and putting his hands up, palm out, to face Bucky.

Bucky wasn't pointing the gun at Zemo. Bucky had never pointed a gun at Zemo.

Bucky was pointing the gun at him.

“Captain!” Zemo all but exploded, sweeping his hand across the cluttered tray of ruined libations to send them crashing to the floor. “If you won't listen to what I have to say, you won't appreciate how we arrived at this moment together, the three of us.”

The seconds ticked away into infinite.

“Now, as I was saying... Leviathan, yes. Mr. Hobbes was a brilliant man who grasped this base nature of ours and the need to reign it in by rule of law. It is not a beautiful or egalitarian law, but it is law all the same. And that is what you have battled for so many years. That wondrous miracle that beats our sword-shaped intentions into the tools we need to build a society worth having.”

  
And for the first time, Captain America was listening.

“What does any of this have to do with him?”

“He is but one such tool, but he's still quite the sword isn't he?” Zemo smiled in such a way that Steve could hear it. “Though that's not quite right, is it? No, he is the cloak and the dagger, the knife in the back. He is an instrument that most perfectly encapsulates our cruel necessity, Captain.”

“What do you mean? What did you do to him?”

“Oh, Captain, did you ever think he was truly yours? Did you believe a short time away from us would undo decades of careful crafting?”

Steve felt the world drop out from under him.

"You were an artist once, hm? You can appreciate the time and care taken to pull an image from marble. Our people were his sculptors, and he is the David to our Michelangelo. Tell me, Captain, do you see his beauty? Do you see his necessity to build a better world?”

Steve's skull was full of cotton. Couldn't speak. Couldn't think. This couldn't be happening.

“Do you see him – us for what we are, here, at the end of you life?” Zemo beamed and, upon seeing the Captain did not share his zeal or his vision, soured. “If you would, my dear Winter Soldier, end this farce.”

Bucky squeezed the trigger.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is an egregious oversimplification (dare I say misrepresentation) of Hobbesian ideas, but it's not really about being accurate. It's about those ideas being run through a drunken, villainous filter. I haven't written a bad guy in a while, and it was an exercise in writing the way a villain perceives a work of literature. 
> 
> You can learn a lot about a person in the *way* they read something and not simply in *what* they read.


End file.
